Charmless Hadronic Two-body Decays of B Mesons

In past years we have witnessed remarkable progress in the study of exclusive charmless B decays. Experimentally, CLEO [1] has discovered many new two-body decay modes B ! K ; K; K; K ; K ; 0 ; !K and found a possible evidence for B ! K . Moreover, CLEO has provided new improved upper limits for many other decay modes. While all the measured channels are penguin dominated, the most recently observed 0 mode is dominated by the tree diagram. In the meantime, updates and new results of many B ! PV decays with P = ; ; ;K and V = !; ; ;K as well as B ! PP decays will be available soon. With the B factories Babar and Belle starting to collect data, many exciting and harvest years in the arena of B physics and CP violation are expected to come. Theoretically, many signi cant improvements and developments have been achieved over past years. For example, a next-to-leading order e ective Hamiltonian for current-current operators and QCD as well as electroweak penguin operators becomes available. The renormalization scheme and scale problems with the factorization approach for matrix elements can be circumvented by employing scaleand scheme-independent e ective Wilson coe cients. Heavy-to-light form factors have been computed using QCD sum rules, lattice QCD and potential models.